The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [43]
I thought of Flower Cannon, of her studio like a sunken cave, her tiny incidental treasures, her collection of envelopes. I wished I could see the phrases the others had written. I was sure she’d led each of us to a moment when a drop of essence sprang out—something delicately insane, not at all “tame”—and then captured it in her box of handwriting. I was sure her cedar box was a beautiful zoo of wild utterances. And the finest accomplishment of her art.
I couldn’t turn it off, the memory of her voice: “She was watching me. She wasn’t blind.”
I remained looking down on the ballfield until the sound of departing cars died almost completely, until the bleachers lay skeletal and deserted, until suddenly the floodlights went off with a thunk, producing a darkness that momentarily felt not only deep but entirely personal to me. My eyes came back and the simple night returned around me and I got up and walked off dusting my seat, shifting my nearly empty bottle of Pellegrino from hand to hand. When a car full of boys sailed past whooping—whooping at me, it seemed—I shouted, “Quiet!” and they yelled, “Fuck you!” in reply. “Fuck you!” I yelled back. They turned the car around at the corner and went past me again, all the occupants squawking unintelligibly like the wheels on a passing train.
“FUCK YOU!” I screamed.
The car slammed to a halt. Its tires thumped over the right-hand curb and then the left as it made a quick wide U-turn and roared back toward me in the lowest, loudest gear. The oncoming glare struck my head like lightning in a bare room.
I flung my bottle with everything I had, right from the earth up. I put so much into the effort that it yanked at the tendons in my legs, behind my knees. Even above the engine’s commotion I heard a sharp clunk, and fracturing glass.
The car jigged sideways just before crushing me, hopped onto the grassy margin, slid across it, and stopped some twenty yards away. A black star, full of an atomic potential, dark and fraught. It rumbled and breathed. For several seconds, nothing else. Then it suddenly burst apart, all four doors, and divided into its constituents like an egg-sack.
They came at me, several boys, I couldn’t guess how many, and in the face of their headlong strength and life I felt myself filling like a balloon; filled to bursting; filled with spitting rage. How I’d longed for this as a teacher!—to charge at a squad of students, to grapple with as many as I could get my hands on and go down in the dirt clawing, kicking, biting. I gouged at their eyes and mouths, took an elbow in the eye, a knee to the kidneys. I wanted to get at least one of them by the throat.
“What’s wrong with this guy!”
“What is wrong with you!”
“He’s crazy! He’s out of his mind!”
“You’re insane! You’re manic-depressive or something!”
“YOU CRAZY BASTARD.”
In no time they had me pinned against the car, a couple of grunting boys on each outflung arm while another, on his belly, embraced my ankles.
“FIVE AGAINST ONE!” I hollered.
“This is gonna cost you! This is definitely gonna cost you! And you better pay! That’s my dad’s car!”
“I’ll fight you one at a time,” I said. And I’m afraid I was crazy, and I meant it. I started the struggle again when hands frisked my pockets.
“Look! Hold still! Just—I’m not robbing you! I just want your license!”
One boy had let go of me—the one whose dad owned the car—and taken hold of his own head with both his hands. He marched back and forth. “We could say it was a small accident! Like when you, when you, when you—I don’t know!” He let go of his head. “Do you have insurance? You better have insurance. We’ll just take your name, your number on the license—where’s his license?”
“He doesn’t have a wallet. Don’t you have a wallet?”
“It’s at home.”
“You threw a rock at my car!” the driver said. “How old are you?”
A good question. I was starting to feel miserable now. Just the same I thought